SLA Media

SLAMedia is a publication of the news for the Science Leadership Academy community. Writers come from the student body in 10th, 11th, and 12th grades. We work in unison to create a functioning paper with biweekly postings on a variety of events.

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Student petitions to re-enroll at SLA

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Screen Shot 2013-02-21 at 9.19.55 PM
A snapshot of the Facebook page created to petition for Angelina Pingitore’s return to SLA.

By Leah Kelly

Staff Writer

Friends of Angelina Pingitore, former SLA student, have created a petition to get support to convince the administration to admit her after she became pregnant and decided to leave SLA at the end of freshman year.

After transfering to a cyber school for the 2012-2013 school year, Pingitore hoped that she would be able to return to SLA as a junior. However, because she officially unenrolled from the school, her place was lost and could not be “saved” for her.

This was a bitter disappointment for Pingitore, who believed she had a good chance being able to return to SLA.

“I told Ms. Siswick that I will have to do a year of homeschool but after that, I would want to come back to Science Leadership,” Angelina told SLAMedia. “I was told that there would be a great possibility [of coming back].”

Ms. Siswick, however, does not recall mentioning the possibility of Angelina returning to SLA.

Ms. Siswick implored that the situation has nothing to do with Angelina in particular. “It’s not a personal thing; she did well at SLA and we liked her. This is primarily about numbers.”

“Right now, we don’t have a space,” Principal Chris Lehmann said, “and if a space becomes available, we will have to evaluate her along with every other student that’s applying.”

The school policy is that that empty spots in a class are immediately taken by students who want to transfer in.

“We get dozens of calls for spaces, so whenever we have a space we fill it,” explained Lehmann.

In response to this situation, Angelina has decided to do one more thing to attempt to get back into SLA.  Sophomore Alexis McCormick, Angelina’s best friend, made a petition for SLA students to sign, and is encouraging students to write letters to Mr. Lehmann and the staff about why they want Angelina to come back.

Their goal was 200 signatures on the petition. As of now, they are 75 signatures above what they had hoped for.

“I also made a facebook event called ‘Bring Angie Back’,” said Alexis, “where past SLA students are able to post whether or not Angelina should be able to come back to Science Leadership Academy.”

If Angelina is not accepted into SLA for the 2013-2014 school year, she is going to attend her neighborhood high school, Northeast High School.

“I guess we’re going to have to wait and see with our fingers crossed,” she said.

…Now Write a Feature Article, An Interview with Ms. Rami

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[SLA]ing by earth streamJacob Lotkowski

Staff Writer

What are teens really thinking about? This is the question that English teacher Meenoo Rami (@meenoorami) set out to answer. The juniors in earth and water streams created their very own magazines with original writing and published them on Issuu.com.

JACOB LOTKOWSKI: How did you come up with this idea?
MEENOO RAMI: I was brainstorming writing ideas with another teacher over the summer, and the idea appealed to me because it’s a form that everyone is familiar with, but it’s not something that most people have done or produced.

As Ms. Rami explains, very few students are asked to do feature writing. She said that she wanted the magazine to be be a complete body of work that her students created from cover to cover. The idea that it would be a teen focused magazine was also a must for her. She wanted her students to have a chance to talk about what they like and what they’re passionate about.

JL: Did you have any apprehension once you started thinking about the project?
MR: I doubted that it would even ever come to be. Trying to get 33 students pulling in the same direction, trying to figure out the quality of the writing, acceptable topics, the layout, how would it all come together, where would the art go, what would it look like, what would it feel like?

Ms. Rami goes on to explain that she’s glad we did it once because now she knows what to expect and what to improve for next year. She says it was a great learning experience for her and her classes.

JL: Do you have anymore to say about what the hardest part was?
MR: I think finding a name that everyone was happy with was really hard. I didn’t anticipate how hard that would be.

JL: Has any other educator done this before that you based this project off of?
MR: Ya know, I’m sure there are, but when I did my own search and reached out to my network of teachers I didn’t really find any. If there are any, I haven’t come across them yet. I would love to find other examples of this type of work from other classrooms.

JL: What did you want the outcome to be?
MR: I wanted my students to experience the writing process from the beginning to the end. What it takes to write a good feature piece, that would be spec targeted to a teen audience, how to incorporate good research, possible quotes from experts, but to still maintain a casual tone to the writing.

Ms. Rami wanted her students to strike a balance between solid content and tone which she thought was crucial to the message of the magazine.

JL: How has the response been, through Tweeting out the link during EduCon?
MR: Oh my gosh, amazing. During EduCon Alicia did an impromptu presentation to thirtysome educators who were all very impressed. The Twitter response has been incredible. Hopefully it will go on The New York Times education blog, The Learning Network, so I think we should get a lot of eyes on it.

Earth stream’s magazine published on Issuu.com
Water stream’s magazine published on Issuu.com


Harlem Shake comes to SLA

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By Isabela Supovitz-Aznar & Jamie Murphy
Video By Isabela Supovitz-Aznar

Staff Writers


In case you didn’t know, the video of the moment is called the “Harlem Shake”.

It consists of one person in a calm environment dancing in a repetitive and funny way. After the “drop” in the song, the calm environment in these videos becomes crazy with people often dressed up in costumes, but mainly dancing as crazy as possible.

With all the technology at SLA, it was only a matter of time before the “shake” came to us.

The idea to create a school-based video actually came from SLAMedia. On Friday, Feb. 15th, Juniors Jacob Lotkowski and Isabela Aznar were talking about the possibility of doing a school-wide “Harlem Shake”  when Journalism Teacher Ms. Pahomov mentioned that there was a fire drill on that day.

They went running to the Principal Lehmann’s office and asked if the school could do the “shake” during the drill, scheduled for last period. Lehmann enthusiastically agreed to the idea, and news spread quickly throughout the halls.

Senior Sophia Henninger, who is often seen dancing around the hallways of SLA, was chosen by Principal Lehmann to be the lead person in the video.

The event was chaotic. When the fire drill happened at 2:50 PM, students who evacuated on the south side of the school piled in to be filmed for the video, although unfortunately not everyone could fit in the frame.

Though the final product is not quite professional, SLA now has its very own, and very original Harlem Shake! Check it out!

Cyclohexene causes Classroom Disruption

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By Jenn Wright

Staff Writer

Science Lab in room 304
Science Lab in room 304

The third floor was evacuated yesterday, February 20th, due to the intense chemical smell seeping out of room 304, Science Teacher Matt Vankouwenberg’s classroom.

The evacuation began around 10:20 at the end of E band; teachers yelling for students on the floor to go to the Café.

The chemical named Cyclohexene, is a colorless, but very pungent liquid. It was being used in an experiment about whether polar and non-polar substances were miscible or soluble in Senior Advanced Chemistry.

The spread of the odor is attributed to the windows being closed before the class started after Mr. VK had opened them in preparation.

Classes on other floors resumed, but third floor teachers held their classes in other places–the Café, the Library and free classrooms on the 5th floor.

Science Teacher Tim Best taught his 10th grade Bio-Chem class in the Library. He said the projector didn’t have a dongle and then it overheated, unaccustomed to being used for a class period at a time. Teaching out of the normal classroom posed problems associated with technology.

Junior Niyala Brownlee was in Ms. Rami’s English Class during E band and said, “It was very faint, but when we walked in the hallway you could really smell it.”

Erring on the side of caution, the evacuation stayed in effect for the remainder of the school day. Mr. VK said, “If we had spilled 350,000 times as much [cyclohexene], we would have still been within OSHA regulated limits to stay in the room for 8 hours.”

Assuming none of the smell escaped the room and all of it turned into a gas, none as a liquid, there would have been about just under one part per million in the room, knowing it’s safe to be a room with 300 parts per million in an 8 hour time period. (source)

That being said, some complained of headaches because the funk was particularly sharp in the halls.

To remedy the smell, dirt from a flower pot was used to soak up liquid from the lab bench and then discarded safely. Coffee was used on the benches to help the lingering smell in room 304, today.

Classes returned to their normal locations today, and the smell seems to have dissipated.